Description of Research Expertise

My area of expertise is health services research, perinatal epidemiology, and health economics. Our research group is focused on answering the question, “why do children have different outcomes”, whether those outcomes are health care use, morbidity and mortality, or neurocognitive outcomes. Our group focuses in three specific areas of research:
1) Quality Assessment and Measurement: We are part of the CHOP center for pediatric quality metrics, one of 7 AHRQ funded sites in the US tasked to define and validate various measures of quality. We have experience using large datasets to assess various measures of pediatric and neonatal care, including the use of hospital readmissions; neonatal complications; and neonatal mortality.
2) Racial/ethnic disparities in care: We have extensive experience quantifying the differences in outcomes between children of different racial/ethnic groups, and to use a number of sophisticated techniques to help define the factors that mediate these differences, including mediation analyses and other techniques we are developing to use on large administrative datasets and longitudinal cohort studies. We have also begun to examine how racial/ethnic disparities may explain, or not explain, observed differences in care delivered by hospitals with similar structures, such as level of NICU.
3) Organization of perinatal and pediatric care: We have several Federally-funded grants to evaluate the impact of structures of health care on perinatal outcomes, from the hospital level to the larger state level.
In addition, we are interested in factors that may explain differences in the processes of care delivered by different hospitals, and how these differences translate into differences in outcomes.